Wednesday was National Stress Awareness Day! Sorry we didn't post this is on Wednesday, our marketing coordinator got the days wrong. National Stress Awareness Day was created by the International Stress Management Association (ISMA) in the UK to raise an awareness about stress, how to reduce stress in your life, support groups and the negative affects it has.

We have all felt or look like the guy in the picture above. Life is stressful between work, family, daily tasks, and everything moving at a fast pace it’s hard to relax and enjoy life.

Stress Awareness Day is your opportunity to start looking after yourself and your life, and break down the individual stressors in your life. Failure to deal with stress in your life effectively can lead to serious health problems, including increased blood pressure, susceptibility to heart disease, and a decline in your immune system. Once you start experiencing these symptoms they can landslide into each other, resulting in growing sickness, and by extension, more stress. Plus, too much stress can cause depression, anxiety, and other mental health problems. It’s truly a self-feeding problem, and a cycle that is necessary to control to enjoy our lives.

The best way to celebrate Stress Awareness Day is to take the opportunity to remove the stress from your life for the day. Take the time to examine your life and find out where all the stressors lie, and start looking into taking steps to remove them or find ways to mitigate them. Plus just taking a few minutes out of each day to do something for you can help reduce stress. Below is yoga positions to relieve stress, activities to do (but you can make it your own), and food to eat and avoid when stress.

Here are the top 5 daily stress reliever poses! Plus here is a link for yoga poses to try at work: http://www.doyouyoga.com/7-yoga-poses-you-can-do-at-your-work-desk-to-relieve-stress-68712/

What you put in your body can also affect your stress. Some foods will help reduce stress while other will increase it!

10 Best Food to Eat for Stress

Green leafy vegetables

Organic turkey breast

Fermented food

Wild-Caught Alaskan salmon

Blueberries

Avocados

Pistachios

Dark chocolate

Seeds like pumpkin or sunflower

Sunshine

Worst Food to Eat when Stress

Sugar

Gluten

Processed Foods

For more information: http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2015/04/27/10-stress-relieving-superfoods.aspx